J. Robert Oppenheimer Biography

J. Robert Oppenheimer is fondly remembered as the founding father of the American School of Theoretical Physics. His significant contributions in the field of science include the ‘’Born-Oppenheimer approximation’, the invention of nuclear weapons and his studies on electrons and positrons. From his childhood days, he was a highly talented boy and completed schooling in a very short span of time. Despite this, he entered Harvard a year late, at the age of eighteen, owing to ill-health from colitis. As a man of perseverance, Oppenheimer was keen on making up for his lost years by taking six courses in each term at college, thus utilizing his time to the maximum. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity, where he was inspired by Percy Bridgman’s teachings on thermodynamics which proved to be a turning point in his career. He was the first physicist to point out the existence of black holes but unfortunately, he did not have the patience to validate his theory. Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize physicist had mentioned that Oppenheimer would have won a Nobel Prize for his work on black holes and neutrons, had he survived and if he had the patience to substantiate his theory with an experiment. A three-time nominee of the Nobel Prize, he supported Leftist Communities in the political arena and was also fond of the Sanskrit language.